More than a currency, bitcoin is an enabling technology

The promise of bitcoin and blockchain extends well beyond its potential disruption as a currency. In this Radar Podcast episode, Balaji Srinivasan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explains how bitcoin is an enabling technology and why its like the Internet, in that bitcoin will do for value transfer what the Internet did for communication make it programmable. I met up with Srinivasan at our recent OReilly Radar Summit: Bitcoin & the Blockchain, where he was speaking you can see his talk, and all the others from the event, in the complete video compilation now available.

More than just a digital currency, bitcoin can serve as an instigator for new markets. Srinivasan explained the potential for everything to become a liquid market:

Bitcoin is a platform for programmable money, programmable interchange, or anything of value. Thats very general. People have probably heard at this point about how you can use a blockchain to trade in theory stocks, or houses, or other kinds of things, but programmable value transfer is even bigger than just trading things which we know already exist.

One analogy I would give is in 1988, it was not possible to find information on anything instantly. Today, most of the time it is. From your iPhone or your Android phone, you can google pretty much anything. In the same way, I think what bitcoin is going to mean, is markets in everything. That is, everything will have a price on it everything will be a liquid market. Youll be able to buy and sell almost anything. Where today the fixed costs of setting up such a market is too high for anything other than things that are fairly valuable, tomorrow itll be possible for even images or things you would not even think of normally buying and selling.

In interviews, Marc Andreessen has noted that the group is increasingly viewing bitcoin as an enabling technology, especially in regard to machine-to-machine technologies. Srinivasan explained, likening the coming shift to the transition from telephone numbers to IP addresses:

One observation I make there is, if you think about the transition from a human telephone number to a machine IP address, that was an important transition because it now meant that machines could communicate with other machines without a human intermediary. You do not need a switchboard operator for your computer to connect to a server, or perhaps more interestingly, for your computer to load a webpage and connect to many servers pulling a lot of assets, right? Those are all basically automated. Humans give the high level direction of, Id like to go and view Google.com, but do not have to deal with the low level aspect of hitting 20 different servers and phoning all these numbers and so on. In kind of the same way, what Bitcoin does is it allows us to move from a human bank account to a machine wallet. So, its a transition of comparable importance that will, we believe, have an impact on machine value transfer thats comparable to what the transition from telephone numbers to IP addresses did for machine information transfer.

Bitcoins potential for disruption could be on par with the Internet, and thats not a comparison, Srinivasan said, that they make lightly. He explained how bitcoin is Internet-like:

If you look at previous eras of innovation, you had in 2009, roughly, the mobile era; 2004, social; 1999, search; 1994, Internet. The previous three eras were things where one or a few companies really dominated Google, Facebook, and then Google and Apple with mobile, and obviously Facebooks doing fine, but we didnt think of it as the company in mobile. These were things where there were dotcoms that were running the platforms.

You go all the way back 20 years to the Internet, and it was not one single company that controlled the Internet. It was decentralized; anybody could build on it. Bitcoin is like that. As an enabling technology, its a commons that people can contribute to. They can contribute to it in such a way that they know their contribution will always be available to them and others can build upon it. Thats very exciting; that is Internet like. We think of it as doing for value transfer what the internet did for communication, making it programmable.

Given his role in venture capital, I couldnt resist asking Srinivasan about his take on the Next Big Thing. He explained why hes keeping a close eye on the regulation landscape:

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More than a currency, bitcoin is an enabling technology